A week inside Charlie Hebdo: how the 'survival issue' was made

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/18/charlie-hebdo-we-cant-let-this-change-our-cartoons-nor-will-it

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On the heavy-hearted Friday night after the two sieges that followed the Charlie Hebdo massacre – and the week’s death toll reached 17 – three long tables were set, like three sides of a square, at a brasserie in the 14ème arrondissement, since the 19th century a quartier for artists and bohemians. This particular bistro is my regular and favourite: unpretentious, unreconstructed and unimpressed by the uniform, airport-like decor favoured by others on the Left Bank.

The company of 16 people – 14 men, two women – was animated, bordering on raucous; wine flowed, though not too much; food is traditional in this place, and it kept coming. One could almost have felt that the vivacity of conversation, animated gestures and full-blooded life-force around the tables were out of place at the end of a solemn week that had seen the murder of staff and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, and others. Except that…

…These were the cartoonists. Those who had missed the fated editorial meeting, or survived it.

I saw among them a man I know: Willem, Dutch anarchist cartoonist – immediately recognisable with his moustache and grey mane – who arrived in Paris during the uprising of May ’68 and has stayed in France drawing for Charlie Hebdo and others ever since. He had been on a train from Brittany when the gunmen struck. I recognised the face of Florence Cestac, who founded the publishing house Futuropolis, which changed the landscape of French cartoons, herself creator of a comic classic: Le démon de midi. It dawned on me: this was their wake and their planning meeting.

This was their defiance, their conviviality. Never mind Rassemblement pour la République by millions of people the following Sunday to proclaim Je suis Charlie: this really was Charlie, minus their slaughtered friends and colleagues.

For three hours, the company discussed, thrashed out, wrangled with – and sometimes argued about – what to do. They didn’t talk about the moment gunmen took the lives of their friends, or the wider implications for liberty, equality, fraternity and the rest – they talked about the forthcoming issue of their magazine.

“We can’t draw! We can’t draw!” said one voice.

“I sat all day yesterday, a few sketches, nothing I’d publish,” confessed another.

There was a proposal that the following week’s Charlie Hebdo should be made up of written contributions.

“OK, you write something, and I’ll see if I feel like drawing something to fit it.”

“The cartoonists have shut their gobs?” came one reaction, along with another bottle of Côtes du Rhône. “That’d suit them!”

“Besides, what on Earth am I going to write?!” pleaded Willem. “I’m an artist!”

Someone talked about “our responsibilities”, as the tarte aux pommes circulated. “We have a duty to say what we have to say, and with drawings – there’s a citizenry out there waiting!”

“Yes,” came a voice in agreement, “the baker on Boulevard Raspail is hurting with us.”

“Hmm,” said a colleague, “but what about the baker in the Gare du Nord [where there was a riot by youths from the mostly Arab suburbs in 2007]? That’s another responsibility.”

They began to trickle away, Willem first – whom I joined at the bar to recall time together at a book fair in Metz. Others followed, with trains to catch, or just exhausted after the events of these days.

Florence Cestac, at the head of the table, concluded over coffee that: “Everyone should have the right to do what they want.”

And another person: “Whoever wants to draw, draw – it’s up to you.”

“But whatever it is,” someone replied, “we vindicate what we are doing.”

And that is what happened. The edition was prepared around a large oval-shaped table in the corner at the offices of Libération – where it had also been produced after a firebomb attack in 2011. And last Wednesday, a crowd of visitors and reporters hauled itself up several flights of stairs to the cafeteria above Libé’s editorial floor, to hear cartoonist Renald Luzier – pen-named Luz – flanked by editor-in-chief Gérard Biard and doctor-writer Patrick Pelloux launch edition No 1,178 of Charlie Hebdo. We applauded as Luz took his place, awkwardly.

He talked about the creative block on which he had choked, as his colleagues had discussed at the brasserie: “I wrote in red ink: ‘Liberty of expression, my arse’ – and the unblocking began there.”

Then he seemed to break down, only to describe exactly how his cover came about: “Then there was just this idea of drawing Muhammad: ‘I am Charlie’. And I looked at him. He was crying. And I wrote above: ‘All is forgiven.’ It was the front page. We had finally found that damned front page, and it was our front page. Not the front page the world wanted, but that we wanted to make. Not the front page the terrorists wanted, because there are no terrorists in it. Just a man crying, a guy crying – it’s Muhammad. I’m sorry we drew him again, but the Muhammad we drew is, above all, just a guy crying.”

As had been clear over dinner, these people are unable to refrain from a joke. So Briard added that now George Clooney “might take out a subscription, so all the women in our office would have his address”.

During preparations for edition 1,178, the procession through Paris by a million and a half people – marching behind political leaders from Britain, Israel, Turkey, Russia and elsewhere – was a parade of power that unsettled many on the paper, and caused some to stay away. Zineb el-Rhazoui, a Franco-Moroccan feminist working at the paper had marched and found it “surreal, because usually we’re alone, despised – and now we’re part of this huge expression by the people. On the other hand, it was very surprising to find who our new friends are!” Laurent Léger, reporter with Charlie Hebdo, did not march. “It had all become too political,” he explained. “I didn’t want to be next to those politicians, or shake their hands.”

In the cruel aftermath, there was reflection as well as grief and defiance among those in the brasserie; and not a little bewilderment in the face of global attention. And unease too: at rising tension in the ghettos and at the notion that – as a French diplomat put it: “Despite itself, Charlie is now a global brand.” McCharlie, indeed.

On the eve of the first funeral – of cartoonist Tignous – Willem, Florence and I resolved to return to the brasserie for a stock-take – and consult by telephone with one of France’s greatest artists in the Charlie Hebdo pool, Max Cabanes, who had returned home to Bordeaux. “What on earth are Cameron, Netinyahu, Juncker and others doing there, saying, ‘Je suis Charlie’?” fumed Cabanes, who created a drawing on his theme specially for the Observer, of the VIP front row on Sunday’s march arranged as a billiard triangle, waiting to be assigned to their various pockets by the cue – a pencil. “Charlie is not a ‘global brand’,” protested Florence. “Charlie is a collection of different artists with different, very special talents.” “They’re not Charlie, and they don’t want to be Charlie,” added Willem.

So: a chance to ask these people, who really are Charlie? What is it to say, Je suis Charlie? “Above all,” says Willem, “it means to be funny, and cultured enough to understand the code of humour. I don’t mean culture as in opera-singing, I mean an attitude. Humour is the one thing all powerful and bigoted people are afraid of. Because they don’t and can’t understand it”.

When politicians declare themselves in favour of free speech, all things are relative. Pussy Riot are feted by the British establishment, but what would happen if a female punk band was prosecuted for stomping on the altar steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, singing abuse of the Queen? Would the media rally to their cause; would they be fawned over by parliament? No, but they’d probably be welcome to take plenty of selfies at the Kremlin.

Which begs the question that Charlie Hebdo’s circle is asking: what have we to do with the leaders of Turkey, Qatar, Britain, Israel, the European Union? The cartoonists insist that Charlie is not and never was a vehicle for politicians to posture. Quite the reverse: Charlie Hebdo was described decades ago as “bête et méchant” – bad and naughty – and has revelled in the description ever since. Wednesday’s defiant edition carried the subtitle: “Irresponsible Journal”. Charlie Hebdo does not want to go the way of Che Guevara or Bob Marley and become co-opted by the establishment. And this cannot logically happen, because as Willem says, there is one thing that no establishment, no dogma, religion or ideology, can bear: mockery. And this runs deep, through the history of mankind and power, especially in France.

Of the thousands of cartoons with which Charlie Hebdo has cocked a snook at authority, one in particular makes a philosophical point. A caveman holds in one hand a pot labelled “petrol”, in the other a wooden stick, aflame, labelled “fire”. He stares at both, wondering what to do. The picture is captioned: “The invention of humour”. And of all the drawings in the wake of the atrocity, one in particular captures the point, by Jean-Yves Ferri, in the magazine Les Inrockuptibles. A jihadist instructor addresses a group of would-be fighters: “Today, we’re going to talk about one of the enemy’s most terrible weapons,” he says, and writes “Humour” on the blackboard. It is the theme of one of the most famous works of recent fiction, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: that the existence of a treatise by Aristotle on comedy is so menacing to the church that it must be seized and secreted if the faith is to survive.

The allergy of power and hubris to humour, and of humour’s subversion, can be said to begin in England with Chaucer’s story about the pardoner selling pieces of the true cross sufficient to build an armada of ships. But it blooms in the mockery of the wise jester with the Fool in King Lear: “I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are,” he scolds the king, “they’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying.”

Likewise the dwarves employed at the court of Spain and depicted so insightfully by Velázquez, or at Mantua by the Gonzaga dukes. They were intended, cruelly, to entertain with their abnormal physical condition, but deeper and mysterious qualities were attributed to dwarves, as they were to Lear’s Fool and later to clowns: of intellectual prowess, clairvoyance and wisdom in the hollow laughter that ridicules power, and watches the march of time and age as a leveller of men. Because of their sagacity, dwarves and jesters were not only allowed but expected to goad and pastiche the noble or the monarch they served, forever reminding their masters of the empty vanity of power.

Willem is interested, he explains, in “cartoons that the early Lutherans did to mock and attack the Catholic church. And during the counter-reformation, artists working for the church drew similar caricatures to mock the Protestants.” Priests and bishops, he points out, “have forever been figures of fun, and targets of the wise fool”.

In France, though, Rabelais portrayed saints as fools, and coined the phrase: “The wise may be instructed by a fool.” In his great book on Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin observes that: “In the eyes of Rabelais’s fool, truth presupposes freedom from personal material interests, from the unholy gift of managing family and personal affairs, but the language of this foolish truth is at the same time earthly and material.”

Modernity and postmodernity have banished this role of Fool. The idea of a present-day politician or monarch employing someone to mock them is unthinkable – quite the opposite: capitalism, theocracy, PR, spin and political correctness require everything to be upbeat, unsubtle and humourless. But Bakhtin’s description of Rabelais’s “fool’s truth” very well describes the special species to whom the role of the dwarf or fool has fallen in our time: the cartoonists.

There is another, more specific and recent heritage: in France known as bandes dessinées, or just BD. “Comic strip” does not quite do the job of translation, nor does “cartoonist” really translate the artist who does them, the dessinateur or dessinateuse. “The literal word is ‘drawers’,” says Willem, who is fluent in English as well as French. “Though this also describes underwear you put your legs into. We are that also!”

Though entwined with an American tradition, modern French bandes dessinées are best seen as descended from Tintin and Astérix. And although we have our magnificent Raymond Briggs, Posy Simmonds, Steve Bell and Chris Riddell, nowhere are comic-strip books so widespread as in France. On the night of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, a newly nominated chevalier of arts and letters, Simone Hisler, who runs a chain of bookshops, reported that one of her stores – Hisler BD, devoted entirely to comic-strip books – remained open five hours after its usual closing time, “everyone in tears, crying together”. Almost all the stock was sold.

These artists are national figures in France, and their albums are cult icons. The most prestigious prize in the world for graphic art is that awarded at the bandes dessinées festival at Angoulême – this year’s, in a couple of weeks, will be charged with emotion. Max Cabanes won its “grand prix” in 1990, Florence Cestac in 2000.

I should declare that the ink of BD runs through my own veins. My mother and sister are illustrators, and when seeking the co-operation of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists for this article, no collateral – not even the names of this newspaper and its daily publisher – was as useful as Alfie, my mother’s best-known character.

There are political roots specific to Charlie Hebdo, firmly within the seed-bed of the insurrection in May 1968. Both the severe and playful faces of the Paris uprising were expressed in a golden age of graphic art. On the serious side, Atelier Populaire produced silkscreens that rank alongside Russian constructivist posters of the 1920s as the greatest political artwork of the 20th century; their image of the factory with a chimney from which a fist rises, reading “La lutte continue” – “the struggle continues” – is a masterpiece. But even these posters included barbed jokes, such as the atelier’s design in response to General de Gaulle’s remark that one of the uprising’s leaders, Danny Cohn-Bendit, was “a German Jew”. It showed Cohn-Bendit smiling manically, as Dennis the Menace, with a caption: “Nous sommes tous les juifs allemands”.

The insolent face of ’68 was already on the streets in the form of the comic-strip weekly Hara Kiri, founded by Georges Bernier, aka “Le Professeur Choron”, and cartoonists Wolinski and Cabu, both murdered earlier this month. Hara Kiri established early on its (and its successor’s) relationship with religion: a Christmas cover showed “the holy virgin mother” hoiking up her skirt and addressing those gathered around the nativity crib: “I had an abortion!”

Soon after the événements of ’68, when General Charles de Gaulle died at his home in Colombey in 1970, Hara Kiri announced his death with reference to a fatal fire at a dance hall, also in the news: “Dance hall tragedy at Colombey: one dead”. The magazine was banned for its audacity, only to bounce back a week later, named after the general, as Charlie Hebdo, tripling the prohibited publication’s circulation.

Max Cabanes reflects on his reaction to Sunday’s march, and that in his adoptive city of Bordeaux, “where I moved, for love. My partner didn’t want to go on to the streets, because of the way this atrocity is being used politically. She didn’t like the stench of the récuperation” – the word for “recovery” being used in France. “But I went. For my dear dead friends, and because if the streets had been empty, that would have been awful. It’s what we do in France: when something happens, we take to the streets. It’s our history, and it’s primal.”

Cabanes is best known for his series of books entitled Dans les Villages, whose dramatis personae are fantastical monsters and creatures in a parallel world, enacting what he calls “a kind of allegory” of our own. It is dark stuff, the origins of which he explains. “It was all in my head as a boy in Languedoc, trying to figure out whether to join the savage world of adults.” Two things happened: “I used to walk down a long street to school through the dark of early morning, and see these people emerge from the secret world of their houses, and wonder: what’s behind the door?” Meanwhile: “I answered this in my imagination, by populating a mythological bestiary in my head, to accompany my solitude, to explain what was going on – monsters and creatures acting out an allegory of the world. Years later, looking for ideas, it took form as Dans les Villages.” The imaginary bestiary, plus the work of Bosch, Breughel and Goya – “they are our food,” he says.

Cabanes learned politics, he says, “as a sans-savoir” – a know-nothing – “it was purely a matter of ethical observation. I was working in a brick factory for a boss who was a shit. I watched the way he treated his workers, and one day told him: ‘I quit’ – and told him why: because of the way he treated people. That is how I entered the golden age of 1968.” He calls the time of insurrection “a crystallisation of all the forms of creativity at work, and the driving force behind Charlie and all it stands for”.

“I like to think, however,” he says, “that the subversion in my books is covert. It’s poetic, and subliminal. More subliminal than the work [I do] for Charlie, though very much in the spirit of Charlie.” He explains: “I don’t think art and literature are the same as pedagogy, to deliver overt political messages. They are too important for that. But it is our job to recognise the absurd, and to ridicule what is already absurd.

“Subversion is subliminal, a state of mind, and for this reason,” he argues, “the suppression of free speech is an expression of the way in which people are ground down economically, and the repression of humour is part of that economic repression.” He does not understand, he says, how artists can “accept an honour from the state. Like those British rock stars who cultivate their membership of the nobility. That’s why it was so ironic to see all those politicians at the march. It was comic in itself, tragicomic like all great comedy, because the very sight of them demonstrated to everyone in the world that comedy subverts the world of hollow power.”

Florence is a regular at the brasserie; she convened that dinner the previous Friday. Born in Pont-Audemer – “the arsehole of Normandy”, as she describes her home town – “I began drawing with my fork, into the food on my plate. My mother thought it was some kind of illness.”

She “drew and drew, nothing else”, studied fine art at Rouen and came to Paris, aged 18, to join the uprising of ’68. “I was jailed for desecration of a national emblem,” she says proudly, “tearing the French flag on 14 July.” In 1972, with her partner Etienne Robial, an editor, Florence established the very first bookshop in France devoted entirely to bandes dessinées. Futuropolis “sold and promoted work we loved, by people we knew and loved”, and out of the shop grew a publishing house, a meeting place on paper for the new wave of talented French comic-strip artists thrown up by May ’68, including most of Charlie Hebdo. “Everyone,” enthuses Florence: “Max Cabanes, Willem, Babouse…” The shop and publisher lasted until 1994, but were ahead of their time: Futuropolis went bankrupt and was sold to Gallimard “for one franc”, under whose vast umbrella it now blossoms (Florence duly wrote its story, in the comic strip True Story of Futuropolis).

Soon after the loss of Futuropolis, Florence’s partner left her, for “some little thing”. Her response was to write her masterpiece: Le Demon du Midi (Demon of the Midlife Crisis), a bestseller adapted as a cult play, thereafter a film. It established her style and ethos: intimate and intensely personal stories told as illustrations of great social themes. One book, Vie de l’Artiste, demonstrates the ethos of Charlie Hebdo: reprimanded by her mother for not wearing pretty dresses, a little girl – Florence, one presumes – stamps her foot: “I don’t want to be like everyone else. I’ll wear the dress I want!” A more recent book tells the real-life story of another Charlie – Charlie Schlingo, in I Wanted to Commit Suicide, But I Didn’t Have Time – again, huge social themes brilliantly distilled into a deeply personal, hollow laugh.

“It’s in the genes of France, this kind of laughter,” she says. “It has always existed, but never quite like at Charlie Hebdo. I know them as artists, as colleagues, as family. We share that sense of humour and mockery. It’s a complex humour that looks simple, unclassifiable, different from your Anglo-Saxon graphic novels. I think to understand humour needs a kind of mental gymnastic – you either have it or you don’t.” She doesn’t think the politicians in charge of the récuperation have the sensibility to understand Charlie Hebdo. “It’s another world from theirs, and I can’t see how they’d connect to it. We are talking here about the absurd.”

Ah, the absurd. We switch the conversation to Albert Camus, as so many have this week in France, and his deep sense of the absurd. We discuss his novel The Plague, applicable to the absurdity of modern times, as well as, literally, to the Ebola crisis. In my favourite bookshop, Tschann on Boulevard Montparnasse, the manager had said: “You know what? Since the atrocity, everyone has been coming in, wanting to read The Plague. It’s uneasiness about everything, the general feeling of things going very wrong.” Florence concurs: “The world is absurd. And we, the cartoonists, see that. We have grown up with this, and that is what Charlie Hebdo is about.”

Back in his native Netherlands, Willem recalls: “I was involved in the eco-anarchist Provo movement, free white bicycles and all that. The fact that bicycles you take to ride now are not free and carry advertising just shows you what’s happened to the world since.”

He came to Paris in 1968, “for obvious reasons, but also because it was a great time for a cartoonist in a country with a deep tradition of caricature, cartoons and line drawing. Paris was the place to be, the political atmosphere suited a cartoonist’s work – cartoons fitted with the slogans and graffiti of the time, its poetry.”

Willem joined Hara Kiri, Charlie Hebdo’s precursor, setting himself immediately to work on blasphemy, vicious political satire and “things some people might regard as pornographic”. And he has been doing so ever since. “I draw for Charlie Hebdo almost every week, and when I go away, I always leave a supply [of drawings] in advance, so no one knows I’ve escaped!” Five years ago, Willem escaped more effectively, leaving Paris to live on an island off Brittany. “We are the kind of cartoonists who have fun while we work. Some people use computers to draw, but that spoils all the fun. Look, here’s my gadget!” – and he produces a bottle of Pelikan ink.

On the universal claim that je suis Charlie, Willem says: “They can sell our ideas – they can stick a label on a hairdryer and call it ‘Je Suis Charlie’ – but they can’t steal them. Politicians and pedagogues who either claim or attack us don’t understand us. They are people saying je suis Charlie who’d never seen Charlie Hebdo. There are people attacking us who have never seen it, or think it’s only concerned with Islam. The fact is they don’t know how to read cartoons. There are people who, even if they are illiterate, know how to view a cartoon. And there are clever people with an agenda who just don’t have the culture to understand our laughter. And among the second group are these people like your prime minister and all the others calling themselves Charlie. It’s completely ridiculous, first because in the end they don’t want us, and they don’t want to be Charlie – how could they be? They hate us! And second because they are pretentious, and all pretention is false. When the king employed a fool to laugh at him, the fool was the only one allowed. Now they want no one to laugh at them, but we are free and we do. And if you abolish humour, or kill the funny people, there is nothing left – nothing.”

Not everyone wants to be Charlie, we note. Marine Le Pen, leader of the neo-fascist Front National, which was excluded from the emergency coalition, said she “did not want to march behind the leaders of Turkey and the Israeli far right”. Her father Jean-Marie, who founded the FN, pronounced: “Je ne voudrais pas être Charlie parmi les charlots” – I don’t want to be Charlie among the clowns. “Thank God they aren’t Charlie,” says Willem. “At least they admit it.”

Some on the left wing have been and remain offended by the cartoons of Muhammad, in sympathy with France’s 6 million Muslims. In December 2013, the paper’s former collaborator Olivier Cyran posted an open letter to his former colleagues on the Article 11 website, which read: “The devastating humour of the Charlie I loved still rings in my ears… I’ve never considered you racist, but unless you proclaim your anti-racism loud and clear … the moment has perhaps arrived to consider the question.”

Last Thursday’s edition of Le Parisien reports rising ethnic tensions in schools. Now, in the Arab ghettos, where in reality colonial rules still apply, people talk about le ricochet of the Kouachi brothers’ bullets: on Muslims in France and elsewhere. There is fear of a nationalist surge – just as America’s 9/11 led to the Patriot Act and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Those at Charlie Hebdo are acutely concerned by, but reject responsibility for, what may be done in the name of – and récuperation from – the murder of their colleagues.

But others outside the paper as well as within it retort that to call Charlie Hebdo Islamophobic, as some on the left have done, is to miss the point. A leader column by Patrick Besson in Le Point puts it thus: “They are the anti-everything. Anti-militarist, anti-police. They’re against the nation, against employment, against the family – they’re against the métro. They’re ‘anar-chics’, delinquents of the crayon and pen.” Zineb el-Rhazoui retorts: “People say we should respect religion, but our attitude to religion is the same as it is to any other ideology.”

Willem keeps saying he has to go, but Florence offers him another glass of Côtes, and he stays. The Dutch heretic is even sceptical that the atrocity will absorb France for much longer. “All the same old problems will remain,” he shrugs. “France will still be the same country: economically unjust, patriotic, racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic. I don’t think the attention span is that long.”

The new edition is on the table in front of us. “Riss did this from hospital,” he says of his injured colleague, pointing to a drawing on the back page. And of the cover, and the edition’s unapologetic tone: “We had to carry on as we have, unaffected. We can’t let this change our cartoons, nor will it. Otherwise, the gunmen have won. I gather that in Egypt, someone has decided that if you turn the cover of the new edition upside down, you get two balls and a prick! Beauty – like humour, I suppose – lies in the eye of the beholder.”